Tuesday, September 9, 2008

Who ARE These People?

Over on Politico there's a story about Hillary supporters coming to the defense of Palin and urging the media to back off. Back Off? They're ASKING QUESTIONS! That's what the media is supposed to do! And you know what a candidate for Vice President is supposed to do? ANSWER THEM!

Don't even get me started on the pull quote saying that "we" have far to go because some people have pointed out that being a mother of five and having a job that takes up 7,000 hrs a week (and I'm talking about campaigning for VP) might create some conflicts. If this election is now about character and family values and the mommy version of the culture wars, I don't want to hear a supposed democrat defending a candidate who would not even be allowed onto a Democratic ticket for what the Rush Limbaughs of the world would say about her family life. Don't even get me started on the anti-choice business.

7 comments:

I know! I really take issue with that woman from Esprit, whatever her name is Buell, I think it rhymes with Mule, which is a you-know-what. I did read a quote from one 51-yr-old Hillary supporter who said something along the lines of, "What do I care I'm not going to gt pregnant."

Anyway, someone over at Salon had a story about why we shouldn't worry about the polls so much, and that made me feel a little better.

I clicked over to the article and, like you, was thinking, what is their problem? Then I saw that Susie Tompkins Buell is the founder of WomenCount. She is a fixture in the society pages here in San Francisco and is well known for her progressive politics. Despite all her talk about being a progressive and fighting sexism, did you know that when she owned Esprit, the company was fined for intimidating workers making $2 an hour and then shut down a factory that tried to unionize? Needless to say, many of those factory workers were women, and I wonder why her feminist beliefs didn't extend to them.

I knew Buell had owned Esprit, but I didn't know about their labor history. Hers is an example of limousine liberalism at its worst. She's got the hypocrisy of spouting surface beliefs and acting on self-serving drives. Someone should "out" her, because all you read of her history is that she founded Esprit, and who remembers the bad news. It's infuriating, and she's applying the same two-faced unprincipled action to this race.

I don't know about your interpretation of the politico blog piece. Seems to me that WomenCount is taking a position that jibes neatly with neither the Democratic nor the Republican party positions -- which positions, let's remember, are on the central question of who should win the presidential race. WomenCount is saying that regardless of who wins (though, by the way, they seem to certainly prefer that the Democrats do), misogyny shouldn't be part of the campaign toolkit. I know it's uncomfortable for Democratic feminists (like you and me, Robin) to imagine that feminism can go with Palin-type Republicanism (is one's stance on abortion rights really the feminist litmus test?), but I don't think it's good for any woman to see this discourse on "she's got too much family stuff so she can't work a big job." Before you bite my head off, I absolutely do agree with you that if a Democratic woman were on the ticket, and her "lifestyle choices" looked like Palin's, she would be crucified by the right. But that's politics for ya'...

OK. Nicole has a point. I'm going to try to focus on policy in order to try to change the terms of the dabte. If only Palin would be allowed to answer a question or two, and not just in a cossetted interview with Charlie Gibson, I would feel a lot better.